The Black Ice (hb-2)

you this, but this body most likely was dumped in that location. Time of death is at least six hours before discovery. Judging by the traffic in that alley and to the rear door of the restaurant, that body could not have gone unnoticed there for six hours. It had to have been dumped.”
    “Yeah, that was in his notes.”
    “Good.”
    She started turning through the pages. Briefly looking at the autopsy photos and putting them to the side.
    “Okay, here it is. Tox results aren’t back yet but the colors of the blood and liver indicate there will be nothing there. I’m just guessing-or, rather, Sally is just guessing, so don’t hold us to that.”
    Harry nodded. He hadn’t taken any notes yet. He lit a cigarette and she didn’t seem to mind. She had never protested before, though once when he was attending an autopsy she walked in from the adjoining suite and showed him a lung from a forty-year-old, three-pack-a-day man. It looked like an old black loafer that had been run over by a truck.
    “But as you know is routine,” she continued, “we took swabs and did the analysis on the stomach contents. First, in the earwax we found a kind of brown dust. We combed some of it out of the hair, and got some from the fingernails, too.”
    Bosch thought of tar heroin, an ingredient in black ice.
    “Heroin?”
    “Good guess, but no.”
    “Just brown dust.”
    Bosch was writing in his notebook now.
    “Yeah, we put it on some slides and blew it up and as near as we can tell it’s wheat. Wheat dust. It’s-it apparently is pulverized wheat.”
    “Like cereal? He had cereal in his ears and hair?”
    A waiter in a white shirt and black tie with a brush mustache and his best dour Russian look came to the table to ask if they wanted anything else. He looked at the stack of photos next to Teresa. On top was one of Juan Doe #67 naked on a stainless steel table. Teresa quickly covered it with the file and Harry ordered two more beers. The man walked slowly away from the table.
    “You mean some kind of wheat cereal?” Bosch asked again. “Like the dust at the bottom of the box or something?”
    “Not exactly. Keep that thought, though, and let me move on. It will all tie up.”
    He waved her on.
    “On the nasal swabs and stomach content, two things came up that are very interesting. It’s kind of why I like what I do, despite other people not liking it for me.” She looked up from the file and smiled at him. “Anyway, in the stomach contents, Salazar identified coffee and masticated rice, chicken, bell pepper, various spices and pig intestine. To make a long story short, it was chorizo-Mexican sausage. The intestine used as sausage casing leads me to believe it was some kind of homemade sausage, not manufactured product. He had eaten this shortly before death. There had been almost no breakdown in the stomach yet. He may’ve even been eating when he was assaulted. I mean, the throat and mouth were clear but there was still debris in the teeth.
    “And by the way, they were all original teeth. No dental work at all-ever. You getting the picture that this man was not from around here?”
    Bosch nodded, remembering Porter’s notes said all of Juan Doe #67’s clothing was made in Mexico. He was writing in the notebook.
    She said, “There was also this in the stomach.”
    She slid a Polaroid photograph across the table. It was of a pinkish insect with one wing missing and the other broken. It looked wet, as indeed it would be, considering where it had been found. It lay on a glass culture dish next to a dime. The dime was about ten times the size of the bug.
    Harry noticed the waiter standing about ten feet away with two mugs of beer. The man held the mugs up and raised his eyebrows. Bosch signaled that it was safe to approach. The waiter put the glasses down, stole a glance at the bug photo and then moved quickly away. Harry slid the photo back to Teresa.
    “So what is it?”
    “
Trypetid,
” she said, and she smiled.
    “Shoot, I was about to guess that,” he said.
    She laughed at the lame joke.
    “It’s a fruit fly, Harry. Mediterranean variety. The little bug that lays big waste to the California citrus industry? Salazar came to me to send it out on referral because we had no idea what it was. I had an investigator take it over to UCLA to an entomologist Gary suggested. He identified it for us.”
    Gary, Bosch knew, was her estranged, soon to be ex-husband. He nodded at what she was telling him but was not